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I would like to know if there is any way to automatically purge old unapproved comments on cron run.

The requirement is -- I have turned on email notification on new comments. I would like to approve only the genuine comments and leave the rest for auto-delete on passing certain time.

Of course I already have mollom, captcha and http:BL to fight spam.

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1 Answer 1

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I'm not sure if there is a module which does that. However, you could do that with the help of some custom coding inside hook_cron:

function MODULE_cron() {
  // Find out the comment ids of the comments that are unpublished
  // and are older than 30 days.
  $comments = db_query('SELECT cid FROM {comment} WHERE status = :status AND created < :created', array(':status' => 1, ':created' => strtotime('today - 30days')))->fetchAll();
  $cids = array();
  foreach($comments as $comment) {
    $cids[] = $comment->cid;
  }
  comment_delete_multiple($cids);
}

You can change the time to fit your requirements. This will ensure that on cron run the comments which are older than 30 days and are still unpublished get deleted.

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  • Sure will do! Thanks for the code snippet. In fact this is what I had thought before posting this question. Want to check if any contrib module is already there as not to duplicate the effort.
    – Sivaji
    Oct 26, 2013 at 15:12
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    BTW, to make the code even better. The SQL query could have "ORDER by created ASC" and db_query can be replaced with db_query_range($query, 0, 200); to delete the oldest first.
    – Sivaji
    Oct 26, 2013 at 15:16
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    @AjitS: Shouldn't it be created < :created if you want the comments posted before the specified creation date.
    – wimvds
    Oct 13, 2014 at 14:05
  • @wimvds Good catch! Answer edited.
    – AjitS
    Oct 13, 2014 at 16:33
  • I needed that for Drupal 6, so ported and wrapped it into a D6 module: gist.github.com/amr/cc76bbfbac380996965f
    – Amr Mostafa
    Nov 26, 2014 at 17:07

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